Peering at New York Through a Prism : John Guare’s new play about materialism, liberalism and familial alienation has a lot of New Yorkers fascinated with themselves

Anecdotes are the meat of any dinner party, and, in the fall of 1983, New Yorkers were feasting on a juicy story about a charming young black man who managed to win the confidence of certain prominent New Yorkers by posing as the son of Sidney Poitier.

On successive nights, “David Poitier” duped two couples by claiming to be a college friend of their children. He told them that he had been mugged and needed a place to stay until he joined his famous father, who was flying in from the coast the next day to cast the film of “Dreamgirls.” Both couples lent him money, dined with him and invited him to spend the night in their tony apartments. Then he robbed them.

Playwright John Guare, who is a friend of one of the couples--Osborn Elliott, then dean of the Columbia School of Journalism and his wife, Inger--tucked away in his files the New York Times account of the young man’s arrest for petty larceny and fraud. Seven years later, the incident has inspired “Six Degrees of Separation,” a play that has brought Guare the best reviews of his career--one hailing it as a “Bonfire of the Vanities” for the stage.

Occupying Lincoln Center’s smallest theater until it moves to Broadway this fall, the production has excited the keen narcissism of the New York theater-going public as only a razor-sharp, sophisticated play about New Yorkers can. Caught in the glare of Guare’s prismatic reflections is the audience itself, who cannot avoid identifying with the dotty characters on stage. The con games of a homeless black man in a plush aerie cannot simply be laughed off--not in a city where the riven face of racial relations pops up on every corner as well as in courtrooms packed with angry, polarized spectators. To say “Six Degrees” is a hot ticket is an understatement.

As such, it is a victory for the 53-year-old playwright who has long been admired for thought-provoking plays that often have been too esoteric to succeed commercially. His best known works remain his screenplay for Louis Malle’s “Atlantic City,” the musical “Two Gentleman of Verona,” for which he wrote book and lyrics, and his 1971 play “The House of Blue Leaves.” In fact, the successful 1986 revival at Lincoln Center of the latter brought together a team, including director Jerry Zaks and designer Tony Walton, which serves the playwright on this production as well.

“John is a great storyteller,” says Zaks. “But his plays are beautiful machines that are very spare. When I read ‘Six Degrees,’ I fell in love with the music of the piece. Even now it’s impossible to pinpoint exactly what the play is about, but I couldn’t wait to figure out how to conduct it.”

It was a daunting effort. Guare crammed into the fast-paced 90-minute play a plethora of contemporary urban themes-- Angst -ridden materialism, facile white liberalism, familial alienation--while seamlessly commenting on everything from the painter Wassily Kandinsky to the musical “Cats” to “Catcher in the Rye.”

But the richness of Guare’s vision is simply a reflection of what the playwright most admires about his con man, here called Paul Poitier, who steals nothing from his victims and wants only to be accepted as “the perfect son” of first Sidney Poitier, and later, of a character named Flan Kittredge, to whom he switches his filial devotion.

In celebrating the young man’s talent for self-invention, Guare mourns “the death of the imagination,” particularly among his affluent protagonists whose narrow lives keep them isolated not only from their community and family but from themselves. Hence the title, which apparently stems from a statistical theory that every person on this planet is connected to everyone else by a trail of only six people. Bill knows Mary who knows Giuseppe who knows Tawana . . .

Guare, speaking animatedly in the cluttered Greenwich Village apartment he shares with his wife Adele Chatfield-Taylor, an architectural preservationist, says he began writing the play last August. “Suddenly, bam, bam, bam, this play was knocking on the door,” he recalled. And though he was working on a different play and screenplay (the movie is set on Wall Street, where his father once worked), he put those aside to listen to the insistent rhythms of the new work. A lifelong New Yorker born in Queens, Guare seems to be at his best exploring the discordant tensions of urban life. In retrospect, the Son of Sidney Poitier Caper appears tailor-made for his mordant wit.

Noting that he couldn’t write the play until the “documentary reality” had faded, Guare says, “I wanted a situation that challenged everything. What is it that we believe? What ultimately counts in our lives? The greatest mystery is the mystery of ourselves. Imagination is the light we turn on to examine that mystery. I don’t want to sound like a pundit, but this is a question I throw out: ‘Why has imagination become a synonym for style?’ ”

There is plenty of style in the trendy apartment on Fifth Avenue of Flan Kittredge, an Upper East Side art dealer, and his wife, Ouisa (Stockard Channing) who are entertaining a rich South African industrialist (Sam Stoneburner) for dinner when the mysterious guest, bleeding, comes bursting through the door. Ouisa (short for Louisa) is so precious in her thinking that when she hears the phrase “striking coal miners,” she pictures “miners modeling the latest fall fashions.” And though the Kittredges are trying to wangle a cool $2 million out of their dinner guest in order to buy a second-rate Cezanne to unload on the Japanese, their lifestyle is later dismissed by one of their own kind as “hand-to-mouth on a higher plane.”

It comes as little surprise that Paul’s entry into this posh sanctum comes through dropping all the right names--and labels: Harvard, Villa Rosay in Switzerland, Kandinsky, J. D. Salinger and, of course, Poitier. In that regard, “Six Degrees” is the obverse of the “radical chic,” which Tom Wolfe lampooned in the ‘60s when limousine liberals hobnobbed with Black Panthers at ritzy cocktail receptions.

But there’s nothing “slumming” about “Six Degrees.” Paul’s color brings up some disturbing questions, but political satire is not Guare’s aim. (The white industrialist, when asked why he remains in South Africa, responds: “To educate the black workers, and we’ll know we’ve been successful when they kill us.”) For when the cultural collision between Paul and the Kittredges occurs, it is sexual, not political. The next morning, the couple is shocked to discover Paul in bed with a scruffy male hustler he’s brought in during the night, and Paul and his bedfellow are expelled from their temporary Eden.

But, even here, Guare discounts the argument that Paul’s sexual adventure could be construed as a contemptuous, even vengeful, act against an oppressor class. Though Ouisa accuses him of just that, Paul replies ingenuously that “I was so happy. I wanted to add sex to it. Don’t you do that?”

Guare says that Paul’s motivations and background deliberately remain a mystery because, he says, “I was not interested in writing a ‘psychological drama.’ ” Aside from wanting, as Paul puts it, “everlasting friendship” from the Kittredges, there is little to indicate how this black man feels about his incursions into a world that Guare describes as “racist, homophobic, and sexist.’

“Those attitudes are just in the air, around us all the time,” he says. “They don’t often get questioned. We can call ourselves liberal or conservative or whatever, but it means nothing until we’re challenged on it.”

James McDaniel, who plays Paul, says that, at one point during the rehearsal period, he panicked at the thought that some might interpret the story as “racist.” After all, he plays an uneducated black man who undergoes a Pygmalion-like transformation in order to enter the lives of upper-class whites.

“I didn’t sleep for four or five days,” he says. “but I realized that I was underestimating John Guare. The play is so dense that if you take in only 70 or 80 percent, you’re in trouble. I believe Paul knows the harsh realities, but he’s living where he wants to be, not where he actually is. Paul’s choices are more aesthetic than political. He’s soaring above it all. Talk about imagination! The guy’s an artist and his body is his palette.”

Director Zaks says that when somebody described the story to him as racist, he responded, “No, this story is not racist. It is not a slap at blacks, it is not a slap at the rich. It is a humanistic story.”

Though Paul’s emotional problems ultimately lead the play into tragedy, he becomes a redemptive catalyst for Ouisa, who recognizes the liberating force of his imagination. “Imagination,” he tells her, is “God’s gift to make the act of self-examination bearable.” Examining the random brush strokes of her own pallid canvas filled with ambitious husband and ungrateful children, Ouisa elevates what begins as a dinner-party anecdote into a profound experience. What she is able to glean from Paul is the desire to connect.

Describing Ouisa as a “vehicle in an abstract play” who Guare uses to express “the possibilities,” Channing sees something poignant about her character’s attempt to break out of her social straitjacket. “Most of us encounter visionaries like Paul at one time or another in our lives,” she says. “We’re just too chicken to do anything about it.”

Yet, it is axiomatic to Guare’s peculiar vision of the world that despite the dislocations of the modern era, most people can be counted on to make the life-affirming choice--even if idiosyncrasies tend to skewer the external logic of that choice--and even though the decision may run afoul of fate.

Nonetheless, “Six Degrees,” at least as it traces Ouisa’s arc of self-discovery, represents the playwright at his most sanguine. Guare says that he has avoided becoming cynical “because I live in New York City.”

“That idea of New Yorkers as cynical and jaded is just a mask we put on,” he says.

“Actually, I think of ‘Six Degrees’ as an urban play,” he continues. “It could happen in any large city where daily life makes such fools of us all. We’re such innocents really. We have to take things at face value in order to survive. You have to be filled with hope every day.”